I ignore the big points, which are fair points, about the economy and inflation listed above.
For me, the key thing is: how many people are prepared and able to spend £500+ just to upgrade a graphics card every few years?
As an enthusiast's forum, I think this point is sometimes missed.
These prices are going to destroy the bottom end of the market.
They won't. The issue is these companies also have to consider how many tech purchases are being pulled forward due to work from home,etc.
So what happens next year or the year after,if sales start to really plateau off,especially if the global economy doesn't really recover,and we have a K shaped recovery?
Also,as I have mentioned before if most of the market is on weaksauce GPUs,without decent feature support,why would PC devs really care about RT,etc? Even now on Steam,the RTX3070 as at number 20,and its the only GPU in the top20 that is faster than a console. The GTX1060 is the most popular GPU on the list! The RX580 has now gone up the list.
Even things like tessellation,etc only became mainstream,when there were enough mainstream GPUs supporting it at a decent performance level.
So are they going to push PC gamers towards streaming services then? Rental of GPUs?
If anything it makes it more likely consoles,are increasingly going to determine the pace of which technologies are adopted.
Smartphones already make at least half of all gaming revenue - I can see more and more people being pushed to phones,tablets and consoles as gaming devices.
The remaining profitable PC games will be twitch shooters and MMOs which have cartoony graphics so they can run on weaker systems.
I know this whole market is broken. I'm so done with it
I am fed up too - it seems companies are more concerned with their accountants,then listening to their actual customers. Its why you had Samsung and Apple doing the same,and caring only for the top few percent of phone sales,and then lots of Chinese companies came along and took the rest of them. Same with Japanese car companies,SK electronics firms,etc.
Financials are important,but also not to such a myopic level the Golden Goose keels over.